Journal of pain and symptom management
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Public Awareness of Palliative Care: A Nationally Representative Sample of Jordanian Adults.
Internationally, studies suggest that inadequate comprehension of the concept of palliative care and misconceptions about it hinder the effective use of palliative care, especially in developing nations. ⋯ The demand for palliative care in Jordan is increasing, requiring increased access, a holistic approach, open discussions, and easily accessible information. Challenges include integrating palliative care into non-malignant progressive diseases, ensuring comprehensive end-of-life care, promoting societal receptiveness towards mortality, enhancing information accessibility, and health promotion efforts. The study's results indicate the importance of implementing educational strategies and engaging families and communities in policymaking to change public knowledge and attitudes toward palliative care.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Creating a Palliative Care Clinic for Patients with Cancer Pain and Substance Use Disorder.
Opioids are a first-line treatment for severe cancer pain. However, clinicians may be reluctant to prescribe opioids for patients with concurrent substance use disorders (SUD) or clinical concerns about non-prescribed substance use. ⋯ The formal collaboration with addiction psychiatry and the integration of harm reduction principles and practices into ambulatory palliative care improved our ability to provide treatment to a previously underserved patient population with high symptom burden.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Symptom-BERT: Enhancing Cancer Symptom Detection in EHR Clinical Notes.
Extracting cancer symptom documentation allows clinicians to develop highly individualized symptom prediction algorithms to deliver symptom management care. Leveraging advanced language models to detect symptom data in clinical narratives can significantly enhance this process. ⋯ This study underscores the transformative potential of specialized pretraining on domain-specific data in boosting the performance of language models for medical applications. The Symptom-BERT model's exceptional efficacy in detecting cancer symptoms heralds a groundbreaking stride in patient-centered AI technologies, offering a promising path to elevate symptom management and cultivate superior patient self-care outcomes.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Leadership's perceptions of palliative care during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study.
Palliative care (PC) played a leading role in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known regarding health system leadership's perceptions. ⋯ Our findings suggest that healthcare leadership increasingly understands the value of PC and its critical role within the health system and during future public health emergencies; this was further reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare leadership recognizes and highlights the need to increase investments in this specialty, both financially and educationally. In doing so, healthcare costs will be lowered, patient satisfaction will increase, and care will be better coordinated.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Should subanaesthetic ketamine be considered when managing opioid refractory cancer pain?
In the cancer pain setting, ketamine has been typically employed as a co-analgesic for opioid refractory and neuropathic pain. One controversial topic is whether subanesthetic ketamine be considered when managing opioid refractory cancer pain. In this "Controversies in Palliative Care" article, three clinicians independently answer this question. ⋯ Three independent clinicians reported a divergence of opinion regarding the usefulness of subanesthetic ketamine for managing opioid refractory cancer pain. All investigators acknowledged the lack of high-quality trials. All agreed on the need for adequately powered trials, the development of standardized methodology, and the exploration of any patient sub-populations that may benefit from ketamine for cancer related pain.